Commander Blood

Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Platforms:

PC

Publisher:

Microfolie's, Mindscape

Developer:

Cryo Interactive

Genres:

Adventure / Point and Click

Release Date:

1994

Game Modes:

Singleplayer

Commander Blood is pretty hard to describe. It features claymation puppets, filmed and then digitized, and held together by a surreal interface offering just enough interaction to pass it off as a game. Basically, you’re aboard some kind of space ship, captained by a guy named Cap’n Bob who’s so old he must be kept in cryosleep almost all the time. While he’s asleep, you’ll pilot the ship to various planets, talk to the inhabitants, and enjoy witty chats with the onboard computer.

The thing is, the interface you’ll use to do all this is just plain weird. To go from planet to pllanet, for example, you flip a glowing pinball down a chute; to answer the phone (you’ll do this a lot), you flip a marble like a coin. And when you want to choose a destination or get info within a planetary system, you click on a big fish.

The alien critters you’ll meet, all digitized puppets, can be amusing. But Honk and old Cap’n Bob get tiresome pretty quickly, as does the amount of time you’ll spend sitting through long, often-repeated conversations and 3D-modeled scenes. And despite the initial novelty of its weirdness, that interface gets very tedious, and you realize there’s just not enough gameplay to hold it all together.